Sanford Health, Sharp HealthCare Join Clinical AI Development Collaboration

Sanford Health and Sharp HealthCare have joined a consortium spearheaded by healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) company Dandelion Health to launch an integrated data platform that allows health systems to access representative, high-quality patient data for clinical AI development.

The Dandelion Platform is designed to provide secure and ethical access to patient datasets, which allows health AI developers to create products and tools to benefit patients and providers, according to the press release. The platform’s datasets include images, waveforms, and structured health records. Dandelion’s goal in creating the consortium is to improve patient care and enable innovation by adopting robust, equitable clinical AI.

“The critical bottleneck to AI development in healthcare has been data,” said Dandelion Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Ziad Obermeyer, MD, in the press release. “People with great ideas cannot access research-quality AI-ready data in a secure, principled way. This means that AI products that could fundamentally transform clinical care aren’t getting built.”

Sanford Health and Sharp HealthCare are the first two health systems to join the consortium. Collaboration leaders would like to add a total of five. Currently, representatives from each organization are in active discussions to recruit three additional large health system partners.

By partnering with five large health systems, Dandelion aims to capture a broad cross-section of US healthcare data, representing rural and urban patient populations from various regions of the country, within its platform. Diverse clinical data is necessary to make AI models more generalizable and equitable, critical factors that have been shown to improve patient safety and outcomes.

“We believe that Dandelion's vision to improve healthcare through partnering with local communities to build diversity into data science and provide leading-edge technologies will positively impact the San Diego community,” said Michael Reagin, Sharp HealthCare’s senior vice president and chief information and innovation officer, in the press release.

While integrated data platforms enable AI developers to build new products, direct collaborations with health systems to build these platforms, like the Dandelion consortium, allow healthcare organizations to be more involved in the innovation process.

“Sanford Health serves a diverse population across our 250,000 square-mile footprint, with two-thirds of our patients living in rural areas. It is vital that all patients, regardless of where they live, are included in the data as well as have access to modern healthcare,” said Kent Lehr, Sanford Health's chief business development officer, in the press release. “We believe this collaboration with Dandelion and Sharp will strengthen the ways we are able to deliver care and improve lives.”

In a similar effort to improve patient care through data science and analytics, Mayo Clinic joined forces with Mercy in a 10-year collaboration to detect diseases and start treatment earlier.

Under the partnership, the two health systems will pull over a decade’s worth of deidentified clinical data and treatment outcomes from integrated EHRs to develop analytics solutions and algorithms to optimize patient care.